Practical tips for small biz owners

First, let me get a secret off my chest: it took my colleague Pamela Wilson and I nearly 8 hours to create an 8-minute video. Yes, it’s true…everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

But I learned a lot along the way and I want to share some of this great adventure in video with you.

Video is a super way to market your mastermind groups, coaching and consulting programs, classes, webinars, and all your service offerings. Here’s some tips to get you started:

Write a script. Don’t think you can wing it, especially if you have more than a minute or two of information to share. You’ll end up wasting a lot of time flubbing your lines and having to re-record over and over again. Be efficient…plan what you’re going to say before-hand. Use a teleprompter, like EasyPrompter, to work with your script while recording your video.

Make sure your video script matches the text on your website. It’s so easy to say one thing in the video and have it slightly different on your website copywriting, especially if you create the two items several weeks apart. Your audience will pick up on these small differences and it will make them wonder which offer is the true offer.

Practice. And then, practice some more. Both Pamela and I found that we were nervous and a little stiff in the first few takes while recording the video. After a while, we calmed down, acted naturally, and even cracked a few jokes. You want to come across as confident and relaxed; practicing will help you do that.

If you flub a line, stop recording. We thought we would be Super Geeks and just edit together several versions of the video in our video software. Big mistake! It’s so much easier to re-record from scratch than to try to match up video fragments in your editor. Unless you’re really good at video editing, do yourself a favor and just re-record the whole thing. (We recorded our full video five times, and that doesn’t include the recordings we made that ended after less than a minute because we goofed a line or started laughing at our mistakes. We should do a Blooper Reel!)

Do a test run, then put that recording on your computer so you can see it full-screen. The little screens on a camcorder don’t really reflect the quality of lighting, color and sound. So set up your lights, do a test recording, then watch and listen to it on the big monitor and good speakers on your computer. If something’s not working right, you want to know immediately, not after you’ve done the “perfect” recording then realized the sound was awful.

Use a microphone. You can buy a simple lapel microphone at your local Radio Shack or electronics store for under $40, and it will make the quality of your sound 100 times better than using the microphone built into the camcorder. Just make sure your camcorder has a microphone jack (it might say “Mic”).

If there’s more than one person in the video, expect to spend more time. When I create videos by myself, I can create a dozen short 2-minute videos in a few hours. When there’s another person in the video, there’s more setup time and more chance for errors. Plan accordingly.

Relax, laugh at yourself, enjoy the process. Don’t get frustrated or angry if it doesn’t come out perfectly the first time. Instead, think of it as a fun adventure where goof-ups and mistakes are part of the game. If you find you’re just getting annoyed with yourself, stop, take a break, then come back and do your recording again.

After much trial and error, we created our 8-minute video. We had a lot of fun that day and laughed at our mistakes. When things went haywire, we took a relaxing lunch break at a local restaurant, and came back refreshed and calm. It was THAT recording, right after lunch, that is the one we used.

P.S. Did you know that YouTube is the #2 search engine? And video results from YouTube will show up in Google search results, boosting your SEO rankings. That’s a very compelling reason why you need to create videos for your business, both to educate (and entertain) your audience, and for marketing purposes.

P.P.S. Video is one of the hottest marketing techniques for 2013. Even if you haven’t considered using it before, or are under-using it now, I encourage you to add it to your marketing mix.